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American Domestic Architecture: Old Types and Modern Instances: I. The Log-Cabin Author(s): Montgomery Schuyler Reviewed work(s): Source: Art and Progress, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Aug., 1912), pp. 673-677 Published by: Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20560713 . Accessed: 04/01/2013 12:28

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AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE 673

class, which does not give us any very admirable addition to the art of picture making, on the one hand, or any moving translation of nature, on the other.

The vital characteristic of modern landscape, that which distinguishes it from ancient, is the pantheistic note: the expression in it of a modern faith, hardly resolved into words but possessed in

feeling. It reveals also in treatment of the human figure in landscape a very different point of view to that shown in ancient art. Nature there provides only a platform and a background, while in modern art it is the sea that interprets the fisherman and the earth the peasant. It is the soul of the earth that looks from the peasant's eyes.

AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE OLD TYPES AND MODERN INSTANCES

BY MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER

I. THE LOG-CABIN

UR architects are showing, in the domestic architecture which is so

easily the best architecture we have to show, a praiseworthy predilection for native and, so to speak, indigenous types. Strictly speaking, of course, we have no autoctlhonous architecture, saving and excepting the wigwam, or tepee, which the discoverers found. But the kinds of habitation which the early settlers pro vided for themselves as soon as they were able to provide any permanent shelters whatsoever, have a preposses sion in their favor for modern domes tic purposes. The very fact that they

were built at a minimum of time and trouble, at a minimum of expense, is a proof that they were the readiest and most straightforward means to the end of shelter. In other words, they con formed to the environment, and conform ity to the environment is a prime virtue in domestic architecture. It cannot be said to be the primary quality of Ameri can architecture at present. The fact that we have so little of an architectural patrimony has been taken in the past as a reason for surveying mankind from China to Peru, and importing all manner of forms, which happened to hit the fancy of the importers, without much care whether the buildings to which they

belonged suited the climate or the social habits of the region to which they were transplanted. The tendency, plainly

manifested only during these last years on the part of our architects of dwell ings, to hark back to our own primitive building, is on a different, and more re spectable footing from the previous "ex cursions and alarums" in the past fash ions of exotic architecture. Here, at least, in our "primitives," is exemplified a manner of building which in the past has been found most natural to us.

The log-cabin is without question the chief of our primitives, the most ex tended and the longest lived. It really prevailed over virtually the whole extent of North America which was opened to the settlement of Northern Europe,

which is to say that the scenes of French and English and Dutch and Swedish set tlement and colonization were all heavily wooded. Only in the treeless wastes of the American Southwest, in which the pioneers were from the European South west, was the construction of the adobe, or sun-baked clay, originally evolved on the treeless wastes of Asia, feasible and tempting. In the greater part of the

Northern States the first necessity of the settler to his subsistence was a "clear ing." Until the forest was felled it pre

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PRIMITIVE LOG CABIN THE HUNTER-S CAMP. WORLD'S FAIR. CHICAGO. 1893

vented the raising of a food crop. "Con sider the value of such a piece of timber in this country," remarked Dr. Johnson in the Scottish Highlands, when he lost his walking-stick and suspected theft. But in the American wilderness timber had no value. To be sure it would burn and could be built of, in houses and farm buildings and fences, though in much of New England the field-stone, which was also an impediment to agriculture, was more eligible for this latter use. But to the first settlers in a heavily wooded country the standing timber was mainly a nuisance. The pioneer would have been grateful to anybody who could and would have extirpated it, root and branch, from all the ground that he could cultivate. Hence, no doubt, the wastefulness in regard to our patrimony, which we are only just now becoming conscious of and endeavoring to repair by the arts of forestry. That the log cabin wasted wood was a positive recom

mendation for it in the early days, and throughout the whole colonial period. Daniel Webster said in the Senate: "It did not happen to me to be born in a log-cabin, but my elder brothers and sis ters were born in a log-cabin"; and

Daniel Webster was born after the inde pendence of the United States had been virtually accomplished.

For a century and a half, say, the log cabin, certainly on all the frontiers of civilization, was the normal and typical American rural habitation. When the first sawmill was erected within the pres ent limits of the Republic would be an in teresting historical inquiry, if there were any means of answering it. For it was the sawmill that worked the superse dure of the log-cabin. Timber had al ways been a commodity, instead of an incommodity, wherever it could be mar keted, either in the form of sawn lumber, or in the form of logs which could be floated to market in rafts. Cutting down

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AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE 675

whole trees for house-building was the cheapest and readiest form of construc tion so long as the pioneer had to build his own house with the means that he had brought with him in tools and the material that the wilderness provided. It became the most wasteful as soon as there was a sawmill which could convert the logs into planks and clapboards.

The log-cabin, with the chinks be tween the logs stuffed with clay, when the builder could not spare the time to

hew the upper and lower sides of the logs to a bearing surface, was by no

means a bad house. Probably it was a better and more secure shelter than the clapboard house with which the sawmill superseded it, than the "thin cedar shin gles, nailed against frames and then filled in with brick and other stuff" which Dankers and Sluyter found the current mode of building in Massachu setts in 1679, than the "timber lined with ceiling and cased with feather edged plank" which the Rev. Hugh Jones found to be the current mode of building in Virginia in 1723. The solid or solidified log wall of the cabin must

have been much more weather-proof than the flimsy frame covered with clap boards, and having its interstices filled either with "brick or other stuff" as in the seventeenth century, or merely lined

with "building paper," as in the twen tieth. It must have been much more nearly fire-proof, since no arrangement could be more favorable to combusti bility than the succession of flues which the frame house constitutes. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the

log-cabin is, in the walls, of the "slow burning" type which has been adopted for mill construction and which dimin ishes so much the rate of insurance. Solid logs do not burn readily, when they are so juxtaposed or the interstices so filled with incombustible material that the flames cannot penetrate them. The fire which would utterly consume the frame house, of the oldest or of the newest type, would merely char the ex posed surfaces of the log-cabin.

It is characteristic that the log-cabin, from the Atlantic to the Rockies and from the Canadian frontier to as far South in the Appalachian range as it ex

LEWIS AND CLARK BUILDING, PORTLAND EXPOSITION

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SWEDISH SCHOOL HOUSE. CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION. 1876

tended; was always the same thing. There are no variations from the type. The type is very well shown in the "Hun ter's Camp," which was Theodore Roose velt's exhibit at the World's Fair in Chi cago. Nothing could be simpler or more straightforward as a piece of construc tion. The dimensions are so moderate that there is no real need of intermediate rafters between the end gables which carry the roof, while the purlins are simply logs also, though of saplings much smaller than the trees which furnish the materials of the side walls. The vul nerable point is, of course, the chimney, which in most cases could be rendered invulnerable by building it of field stone, but which, even when it also had to be built of logs, could be protected, with a fair degree of efficiency, by smearing its inner surfaces with a coating of clay. The whole ground story is given up to what is now known as the "living room," while there is head room enough in the roof to make sleeping quarters even for the patriarchal family of an early settler,

seeing that the children as they grew up, commonly paired with the children of the neighbors,' and each pair acquired another log-cabin to itself.

It is equally characteristic that the American log-cabin. never, in its original estate, took on any architectural develop ment. Partly, no doubt, that came from the fact that as soon as the settler had prospered sufficiently to build a house larger and more pretentious than his original and provisional log-cabin, the sawmill was available with its tempting facility and cheapness of construction. But chiefly, it is to be feared, it came from the fact that the "Anglo-Saxon" settler belonged to an inartistic race, which had neither the instinct nor the capability to develop the possibilities of a construction which, even in its simplest expression, suggested those possibilities to more artistic peoples. Far from the

American pioneer or his successor was the innate impulse toward expression which had such brilliant results in the architecture in wood of Switzerland, of

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FREDERICK KEPPEL 677

Scandinavia, even of Russia. In the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition there was a most interesting example of the Scandinavian log-construction in the Swedish school house, then shining yel low with shellac, but long since weather

worn to grimy blackness in its subsequent habitat in Central Park, New York, for which it was judiciously secured at the closeof the fair. No American World's Fair since has been complete without some magnified and glorified log-cabin. In addition to the indigenous example of the Hunter's Camp at Chicago, there

was an admirable adaptation of the Swiss chalet in the State Building of Idaho, a construction of logs on a ground story of rough stone, which might have been developed among the wooded mountains of Idaho as il those of Switzerland, ex cepting that Idaho "lacked the sacred

poet." The Portland Exposition simi larly showed, in the Lewis and Clark

Building, a successful adaptation, of the Swiss chalet, with a motive taken from the well-known chalet at Rossinieres, but

with modifications which redeem it from any servility of imitation.

These examples suffice to show how completely the log-cabin has changed its function from that of the most practical and utilitarian of all possible construc tions to that of a mere toy. One can no longer recommend it as the basis of an American dwelling, unless the dwelling be itself a toy. This is the case in the Adirondacks and other still wooded re gions in which rusticating citizens have built for themselves cottages or "camps." TheV have in fact frequently taken .the primitive log-cabin for their model, but with so small a measure of artistic suc cess that, after some search, no example has been found which can be commended as worthy of imitation or of illustra tion.

FREDERICK KEPPEL BY WILLIAM ASPINWALL BRADLEY

THE death of Frederick Keppel re moved a figure not only of great

personal charmn and individuality, but

of considerable significance in American culture among the last four decades. A pioneer print dealer of America, he did far more than any other individual to stimulate an intelligent general interest in etching and engraving. This was due in a large measure to a rare enthusiasm and an elevated conception of public service on his part. Loving the things in which he dealt, a friend of the men who fashioned them in his own day, a patriotic American, proud of his adopted country, and ambitions for her future in the appreciation of the fine arts, he from the first regarded the educational as in separable from the commercial aspect of his enterprise; and his lectures, articles, exhibitions and gifts of prints to mu seums and libraries all bore relation in his mind to a liberal and well-defined policy of enlightenment. This element

of idealism and disinterestedness in the man was promptly and fully recognized, and it brought him the respect and firm friendship of distinguished men and women in all fields of intellectual activity.

AIr. Keppel's position in this country was unique, in that he formed a living link with an important movement of

modern art abroad. Haden, Legros, Bracquemond, Buhot, Lalanne, Fantin Latour-these were but a few of the masters of nineteenth century painter etching whom he met regularly in Lon don and Paris, and whom he could call his friends. Naturally, from such inter course he derived a fund of witty and characteristic anecdote which enriched his talk. How racy and original this was, only those can know who were priv ileged to hear him relate, for example,, his first meeting with Whistler.

Although his literary style admirably conserves certain qualities of his conver

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